Munich’s largest taxi operator says it will keep the brand, the dispatch and the data. Here, the dispatch software is already owned by a competitor

On 27 October 2026 Münchner Taxi Zentrum, Munich’s largest taxi operator, and the Californian company Tensor Auto signed a letter of intent to put up to 500 autonomous vehicles on German roads. Reuters reported it.

Start with what it is not. It is a letter of intent, subject to definitive agreements and to Level 4 regulatory approval in Germany. No such vehicle is carrying anyone, the financial terms were not disclosed, and everything that follows is how the two companies describe themselves in their own release.

With that said, the shape they describe is worth an operator’s attention, because it is the reverse of the arrangement this trade knows best.

How they describe it

MTZ would run the vehicles under its own brand, within its own taxi service. The release says the Robocar “integrates with MTZ’s existing dispatch systems, so riders book and ride with MTZ as they do today”. Tensor sells the vehicle and supplies the driving as a recurring subscription it calls Autonomous Driving as a Service.

Then there is the line to read twice, also from the release: “control of the fleet, the customer and the data stays with the taxi company and therefore in Europe”.

Gregor Beiner, MTZ’s chief executive, puts it this way: MTZ will bring autonomous vehicles to Munich’s streets “under its own name, with the service quality and data sovereignty our customers trust”. He adds that professional drivers “remain indispensable: wherever personal service, assistance or a human touch is needed, they make the difference”.

Now read it next to Autocab

In August 2020 Uber bought Autocab, which supplies booking and dispatch technology to private hire operators, which is to say to the firms Uber competes with. On 29 March 2021 the Competition and Markets Authority closed its inquiry having “found no competition concerns as a result of this deal”.

It is worth remembering why it closed. The authority put to itself exactly the question of whether operators could be forced to pass data to Uber, and set it aside because there are “other credible suppliers of BDT and referral networks that these taxi companies could switch to if Uber were to reduce the quality of the Autocab service or force them to share their data”.

So the regulator’s answer to the question of who controls an operator’s dispatch was: the operator can leave. Not a promise from the supplier, not a clause. The ability to go elsewhere.

Five years later, a technology vendor in Germany is selling the other answer, and putting it in the headline of its own press release. Whether it holds is a question for the contract. That it is being marketed at all is the thing to notice.

What this changes, and what it does not

It does not change anything in Britain today. No Level 4 approval, no vehicle, no equivalent deal announced here. Pony.ai and Uber said in October that London testing would begin in the coming weeks, and the Uber and Wayve service in London runs with a safety driver in every car. In both of those, the booking belongs to the platform.

What it does change is the range of what can be asked for. Until this week the choice on offer looked like a single shape: the technology comes with the demand attached. One letter of intent does not make a market, but it does make the question askable at the next renewal.

What is worth watching

Not the number 500, which is conditional, and not the dates.

Two things instead. Whether integration into an operator’s existing dispatch survives the move from announcement to contract, because the distance between adding vehicles to a system and becoming somebody else’s supplier of drivers is measured in clauses.

And the fact that data sovereignty is now a selling point. A technology vendor put it in a press release because it works, which means operators are asking for it before they sign.

From here on this is about what we sell, so read it as that.

What we do

UrbanGo is the software an operator uses to take jobs, assign them, record them and keep its own customer list, telephone jobs included. We do not run transport, we do not open operating centres and we have no passengers of our own.

On data, we do not ask anyone to trust a sentence in a press release. The records stay with the operator and export at any time, in a format any other system can read, at no charge and without asking permission. It is a clause in the contract.

The CMA was right about the shape of the protection. The difference between a promise and a clause is that a clause can be read before signing.